Trump Closes Out Midterms By Eyeing Impeachment of Mitch McConnell

Less than a week before the midterms, two former presidents shared their closing messages. Barack Obama spent his Wednesday evening visiting Arizona, rallying for Democrats and speaking to the fragility of democracy. Meanwhile, Thursday morning, Donald Trump suggested that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell should be impeached if he allows the debt ceiling to be raised.

“It’s crazy what’s happening with this debt ceiling. Mitch McConnell keeps allowing it to happen. I mean, they ought to impeach Mitch McConnell if he allows that,” Trump said, responding to a question about Congress potentially eliminating the debt limit. “Frankly, something has to be—they have something on him. How he approves this thing is incredible.”

The comment comes as Democrats seek to eliminate the debt ceiling before Republicans potentially retake congressional majorities. They fear Republicans using the debt limit as an excuse to cut spending on social and economic programs.

The former president, largely taken to be the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination, wants his party to hold strong on a debt limit they themselves raised three times throughout Trump’s presidency. Under Trump, U.S. debt increased by $7 trillion.

But Trump suddenly cares so much about the debt ceiling that he’s willing to call for the impeachment of the Republican Party’s Senate leader.

Members of Congress can’t really be impeached. A 1797 impeachment against Senator William Blount of Tennessee established that members of Congress could not be formally impeached; rather they could only be expelled from office by a two-thirds vote by their respective chambers.

This is not the first time Trump has picked a fight with McConnell. Last month, Trump said McConnell had a “death wish” for supporting Democrat-sponsored legislation, and hurled racist comments at Elaine Chao, McConnell’s wife, calling her McConnell’s “China loving wife, Coco Chow!” Trump has also called McConnell “a piece of shit,” and urged Republicans to replace him.

Numerous sitting and potential Republican senators have expressed hesitancy for McConnell to be party leader.

Even if Republicans do gain power this election after such stellar closing arguments, there will be a clash between two camps: McConnell or Trump. The Republicans are in disarray.

Maternal mortality in Georgia will increase by nearly a third if the state bans abortion, a new study has found, which it could well do if Brian Kemp is elected governor next week.

A study by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder found that if abortion is banned in Georgia, maternal mortality will increase 29 percent. If the procedure is banned nationwide, then maternal mortality will rise 24 percent overall.

Maternal mortality among Black people nationwide will skyrocket 39 percent.

The United States already has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed nations, and Georgia has the second-highest rate in the country, of 48.4 deaths out of 100,000 births, according to the World Population Review.

It is second to Louisiana, which has 58.1 deaths out of 100,000 births.

Abortion has become a major issue since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Several states, including California, Michigan, and Vermont, will vote in midterms next week on whether to codify abortion in their state constitutions. Kansas voted over the summer to keep abortion protections in the constitution.

Georgia has enacted one of the strictest abortion laws in the country (short of an outright ban). The procedure is banned after six weeks, before many people know they are pregnant, and there are many restrictions on access before the deadline.

During a recent debate, Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp refused to say whether he’d sign even more restrictions into law if elected.

His opponent, Democrat Stacey Abrams, was quick to seize on his non-answer: “Let’s be clear, he did not say he wouldn’t,” she warned. “Under this governor, women are in danger.”

Abrams highlighted several of his stances, such as supporting the cruelly restrictive Texas abortion law that offers financial rewards for turning in someone who had an abortion, and signing a law that would allow investigations into pregnant people who miscarried.

“Abortion is a medical choice,” Abrams stressed during the debate. “That is a decision that should be made between a doctor and a woman.”

“There should not be arbitrary timelines set by men who do not understand biology,” she said, adding that 82 of Georgia’s 159 counties do not have an OBGYN.

But as the CU Boulder report shows, the situation in Georgia looks set to get much worse.

Last week, ahead of acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk visited the company headquarters. “Meeting a lot of cool people at Twitter today!,” he tweeted.

Turns out he’s going to fire half of those “cool people.”

Bloomberg reports that Musk plans to lay off about 3,700 people on Friday, in an effort to drive down costs of an acquisition that has placed about $13 billion worth of debt onto the company. The exact number of cut jobs and amount of severance to be offered is still in flux, according to the report—but the 3,700 number would cut the company’s staff in half.

Musk also plans to require all employees to work in person, reversing Twitter’s work-from-anywhere policy instituted amid the pandemic. The billionaire has suggested that people who prefer remote work should “pretend to work somewhere else.”

The news comes after reports that numerous companies—including Coca-Cola, Spotify, and HBO—are considering suspending advertising activity on Twitter, amid concerns that Musk’s “maximalist” approach to free speech may make the platform unsafe. The social media platform nets some 90 percent of its revenue from advertising. General Motors has already suspended its advertising for the time being.

And while Twitter’s primary source of revenue is threatened, Musk has pushed employees to work day and night on a haphazard plan to generate enough money to keep the platform afloat. The largely-formulated-through-tweets plan would charge users $8 a month, so they can receive benefits like account verification and visibility priorities. Such a plan could lead to further issues involving misinformation and hate speech, potentially encouraging more companies to cut advertising.

“The expectation is literally to work 24/7 to get this out,” Musk reportedly said in an internal company message. While employees throw themselves into making Musk’s financially unsound vision become reality, there’s no guarantee they’ll even have their job in the coming days.

Right-wing activists showed up to protest President Joe Biden’s speech Wednesday night warning that the future of U.S. democracy was at stake in next week’s midterm elections.

But things didn’t quite go to plan: there were only six of them.

“Outside of Union Station, six low-energy right-wing activists have gathered to protest Biden‘s speech,” Daily Beast reporter Zachary Petrizzo said on Twitter, alongside a photo of the group.

The protesters had two flags and posters with photos of people who had died during the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

In his speech, Biden slammed “extreme MAGA Republicans” who he said are already trying to undermine the election results. “We can’t take democracy for granted any longer,” he said.

While he spoke, protesters tried to get a chant going, but there weren’t enough of them to make an impact. Later, when Biden left, they missed the motorcade and thus another opportunity to complain that the 2020 election had been stolen or that those arrested for the January 6 insurrection were political prisoners.

One of the oddest details, though, was the people the protesters chose to feature on their signs. The victims included Ashli Babbitt, who was shot dead by Capitol police while trying to enter the building on January 6; and Rosanne Boyland, who appeared to have been trampled to death by the crowd of insurrectionists, but a later medical examination revealed she had died of an amphetamine overdose.

Another poster featured Brian Sicknick, a Capitol police officer who was violently assaulted by rioters on January 6. He suffered two strokes the next day and died.

His mother, Gladys Sicknick, is actively campaigning against election deniers running for office. In a recent ad targeting Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, Sicknick charges that “my son died because of people like Kari Lake.”

Lake “is very dangerous for our country. She saw what happened on January 6 and continues to spread the big lie,” Sicknick says in the ad.

Former Capitol police officer Michael Fanone, who was also brutally attacked on January 6, praised the ad.

Gladys Sicknick is “out there, I think trying to do what all of us are trying to do here, which is bring accountability for January 6,” he told MSNBC. “And, you know, I also support the fact that Kari Lake’s a piece of shit.”

On Wednesday, Politico published eight emails showing Donald Trump’s legal team discussing how Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was their “only chance” to stop the certification of the 2020 election.

How did Politico get those emails? A Trump lawyer forgot to deactivate a Dropbox link.

The emails illuminate efforts by Trump lawyer John Eastman and other members of the former president’s legal team to challenge the 2020 election results. Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro wrote in a December 31, 2020 email that Justice Thomas was their “only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan. 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress.”

“I agree with this,” Eastman replied, writing that court action would help “kick the Georgia legislature into gear.”

District Judge David O. Carter had ordered Eastman to turn over these and other emails to the House select committee investigating the January 6 riots by October 28, determining that they showed evidence of potential criminal activity.

On the day of the deadline, Eastman’s legal team sent an email to the 9th Circuit Judge, requesting an emergency stay. But after Carter had refused a deadline extension, Eastman’s lawyers folded, sending a Dropbox link including the emails to the committee, seven minutes before the deadline.

They also requested the panel not actually read the emails until the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on the request for a stay. But Eastman’s legal team didn’t formally file for the stay until later that evening—after the email was already sent.

And so it seems by continuing to try keeping the emails away from the January 6 committee, Eastman’s team accidentally exposed them to the public. When the appeals court asked for filings from both parties in response to Eastman’s request for a stay, the January 6 committee sent over Eastman’s email, which had the for some reason still active Dropbox link.

The House general counsel did not know that the link in his emails was still active, when filing with the court:

“Some media outlets have been able to access the Dropbox link that counsel for Dr. Eastman created to share documents with the Select Committee and that was included in the attachments to the brief we filed with the Court last night in response to Dr. Eastman’s emergency motion. We were not aware that the links in Dr. Eastman’s email remained active…”

In similar fashion to Alex Jones’ lawyers accidentally leaking the entire contents of his phone as the Infowars founder was being sued for defamation, it seems that the legal team of the former president’s legal team have cast a major blunder for their client.

Read more at Politico.